As you’ve probably seen from the latest picture of the day, I am now the proud owner of a unicycle. Why do you ask… because real men only need one wheel. Acutally it’s something I’ve always wanted to learn and last night I found out how fun that could be.

Day 1: I got my unicycle fairly quickly, it came Monday evening. After I got most of it together (yes… some assembly was required), I found out I needed a couple of metric allen wrenches. After paying twice as much for the set of metrics then for the set of standards, I had my unicycle together. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject and thought the seat height was good for my height of 6 foot. Before going out I tested it, and found out it sure wasn’t, I could barely reach. the peddle when it was at the bottom. Time to get the ol’ saw out. I’ve got a small saw with an 8″ blade on it, after I realized I was using the wood blade, I soon made short work of the first cut… still too long. I made another cut and thought it would be alright and headed over to the high-school for a wall to help me learn. After half an hour I managed to figure out how to get on the thing, and how to fall (which to some people is important, heh!) Later that night I made three more cuts to the seat post, with the metal blade =P, and I think I finally got it at the right height.

Day 2: This day went a lot better than the first outing, I think mainly do to the fact I had the seat at the right height. I was getting better at getting on it (still using the wall to help steady myself), and managed to hit a record of 10 feet without using the wall to help maintain balance. I tried free mounting (getting on without a wall), but that didn’t go so hot… I was out for about an hour today…

Day 3: My break through day! I started using the wall at the school for about an hour… I noticed my seat was a tad crooked and asked Susan if she could bring me my allen wrenches on her way to the gym. Luckily she hadn’t left yet and managed to get them to me. After correcting my seat I practiced for another half hour or so and everything was going really well. I had managed to get good enough to go the length of the wall, only problem was there was a wall perpendicular to this one… I quickly decided I’d make a go in the parking lot. Using a lamp post to get on my uni, my first trip sent me out about 40 feet or so (wOOt!) A couple more lengthy trips (still using the lamp post to start from) and a voice over the PA system told me, “School’s closed, pack it up and go home!” So I did just that… I tried free mounting and was acutally able to get in a couple revolutions, but mostly I practiced by using our mailbox to help steady me. I was doing pretty darn good, as I was getting 20+ feet every few tries, sometimes 40 feet, and I made a record trip of about 65 feet! At this point it was getting dark, and I saw Susan coming home from the gym. Wanting to impress her, I waited for her to pull into the garage and was on my uni when she came down the diveway. I managed to get 50 feet, and all she could say was, “Wow you’re kind of wobbly…” and “why don’t you just ride back?” as I wa walking back… Some encouragement… but I didn’t let it get me down, I was super excited I could go that far at all. Unicycling is a ton of fun, I can’t wait to get back out and try some free mounting and maybe learning to turn (could be useful…) Today I was out for about 2.5 – 3 hours.

Susan did say she was impressed later that night. In other news, we have been hitting the movies up quite a bit lately… We did a double feature of Transformers and Harry Potter. Harry Potter was okay, but I really liked Transformers… Susan said she even liked it so it can be all bad… We’ve also seen Ratatouille (twice), Hairspray, and Knocked Up (not for the faint of heart)… I gotta give it to John Travolta for pulling off some of those dance moves, in a plus size woman suit (Hairspray). They were all pretty good. I’m still trying to get Susan to go to Live Free or Die Hard…
As many of you know, the last Harry Potter book hit the stores last weekend. Susan was pretty bummed for not getting a pre-order, but Friday night we thought we’d swing by Wal-Mart around midnight to see if we could get our hands on this critically acclaimed book. Sure enough we found the line and didn’t even have to wait that long (though we were about 30 or 40 people from the front). After we got our copy, we headed to the front of the store to check out. Logical Wal-mart only had one lane open and there was one heck of a slow moving line… An announcement came over the PA, telling all employees to move to the front of the store to open some more registers. Hearing this, it was my idea to stand by one we thought would open and sure enough it worked, we were about the third ones in line. Our associate however had the daunting task of figuring out how a gift card works (we spent a long time waiting for the first person to be checked out in our line). After that we had our book in hand… and Susan stayed up most of the night reading it whilst I was immersing myself in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (execellent game). That was pretty much our weekend, Metroid and Harry Potter…
As for my job status, I’m still looking for something new and exciting… my job has gotten quite boring in the past few weeks. A couple new oppurtunities have presented themselves, but all I can do is apply… wait… and hope… Tuesday was actually pretty fun, I did my second speech for Toastmasters. It was about racquetball and I think everyone really enjoyed. I got great feedback and am now aware of a few things I can work on for my next one (which I’m really excited about doing!) As for playing racquetball, Mittag has gotten to be quite the opponent, the harder he is to beat, the more fun it is to play (for me anyway…)

I hope everyone had a fun (and safe) fourth of July. Me and Susan took the whole week off and went up north, to da UP, eh! Susan was asked to play in a wedding on the 30th. So we decided to go up on Sunday. I was also put in charge of our second home improvement project (our first successful one!) To prevent weeds and keep grass clippings away from the AC unit, we thought we would put a rock bed in. After we picked out the type of rock and border brick, I was quickly underway. I ended up making three trips to Home Depot, one for the bricks and two (low-riding trips) for the stones. We ended up buying about half a ton of rocks, which is why I made two trips… The project turned out really nice, we probably made the area too big, but oh well, it looks good (pictures to come soon…)

So we made our way up north on Sunday and that was the longest drive ever! We wanted to get breakfast at Big Apple Bagel in Bay City only to find out it was closed. After a quick run through McDonald’s, we managed to get on I-75 in some pretty heavy traffic. After awhile we realized we didn’t have our PWC certificates… We turned around to get those, sitting through that horrid class, we better get some fun out of those certificates =P. The drive seemed to take forever about eleven hours if you count the time we originally left the house… It was a nice relaxing week, there was jet-skiing, fireworks, a parade, and all sorts of fun in Michigamme. We found out the Seadoo can hit speeds of 55 mph and that it has quick responses at such speeds (well at any speed really…). The first time Susan got on to drive I went with her and we almost ended up going for a swim. She was cruising along around 45 mph and I told her watch out for the buoy/rocks ahead well she turned slightly and I told her better turn a little more to make sure we avoid any unseen rocks… She cranked the handlebars and my weight shifted, but I had a steady grip around Susan… if I was going she was going… After that she told me I wasn’t allowed to hold on to her anymore… yeah right! The joke after that was we should have given her the beginner’s lanyard as that caps your top speed around 27 mph. After the week ended we slowly packed our stuff up, some how we got more of Susan’s junk (how much more could she possibly have?) and got ready for the work week ahead of us after a much needed break.

For all of those faithful readers out there, here’s the scoop on our first anniversary celebration! Weeks and weeks of planning and it was finally time to unveil my latest DVD creation. Okay so I didn’t quite get it onto a DVD, but it was a good effort (grrr you Movie Maker!) Awhile back I ha asked my folks and Susan’s parents to scan in bunches of pictures of us when we were kids. I wanted to create a digital photo album on a DVD with music and all sorts of neato special effects. Susan’s mom almost took the surprise out of it, but I managed to dodge that bullet and Susan was still unsuspecting. After editing all the photos and creating a project in Movie Maker I thought I was all set. Apparently there’s a bug in the code which makes it very difficult to create movie projects greater than 20 minutes. This was all very annoying. I found this out after importing all those pictures (a lot!) I should have known something was up when it took like 45 minutes before my final project file would actually open up in Movie Maker… my movie was just over an hour long. And this was without any background music. Not wanting to redo all my hardwork, I fought with that program to the bitter end. I managed to encode a WMV file from Movie Maker and thought I was set. This file was about 250 megs and easily fit on my flash drive (I was doing this at work while I had free time… which was a lot of the time). Getting home I tried and tried to get that dumb file to encode to a DVD compatible format. For some reason the audio wasn’t working. I figured it had something to do with the WMV file. So using my work computer, I encoded an AVI file thinking the sound would work. One problem with that is the AVI file was only about 14.7 gigs. Not easily transferable… Anyway, back to two nights before our anniversary… I stopped by Meijer on the way home and bought some really expensive orange juice and some not-so expensive champagne. After our fancy dinner at the Doubletree Hotel I told Susan I had a surprise for her. I set up our round chairs in front of my computer, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and made some mimosa’s. I fired up the WMV file I had (even though the compression made it a little fuzzy) and played through our “DVD”. Susan seemed to like it and I recently managed to get it onto a DVD (there was a bug in the script I was using to create the DVD structure, a fairly easy fix, but annoying as heck!

The next day I had another big surprise for Susan. We headed to the west side of Michigan to a place known as Silver Lake. If you haven’t been there, you should check it out! We stayed at a Jellystone Campground and didn’t even have too many arguments putting the tent up (it was close though…) I was pretty disappointed as we didn’t even get to see Yogi (probably because we didn’t have a picnic basket…) The campground was really nice and they had a lot of things going on… My plan was to check out the Sand Dunes. If you think that’s boring, guess again… they have four-wheelers and dune buggies to rent that you can take all over the dunes. Feeling a little hungry before we hit the sand, we went over to Whippy Dip. Although it’s famous for their hotdogs we ended up getting subs there. Be warned they come on garlic bread (just ask Susan how good mustard goes with that =P). After fueling ourselves up, it was dune buggy time! We headed over to the rental place and watched a really cheesy video about riding in the Sand Dunes. We then got escorted out to the dunes and were ready to get going. The guy told me to keep a good speed going up the entrance ramp and don’t slow down or I’ll get stuck. So, after making it up the mile-long entrance ramp, we met up with the guy again and he gave us some tips about driving around. “Just gun it!” stuck in my mind as I attempted to climb my first hill. Well we made it about 3/4 the way up and sure enough got stuck. A little wiggling and we managed to get free. The guy asked me how that went, and I said not so hot. Some more advice and we were off again (and stuck again not too long after). After getting stuck a couple more times and helping some other people get unstuck (at least I wasn’t the only one, heh!) we had one heck of a time! The time seemed to fly by and we needed to get the buggy back in. Only one problem… we didn’t know where the exit ramp was. After riding around, we did manage to find it and get the buggy back in time, whew! Man that was awesome.

Later that night we went over to Craig’s Cruiser’s. It’s a pretty neat place that has an arcade, go-karts, and mini-golf. Lucky us after paying for a round of mini-golf we got stuck behind a group that went really slow. The line just kept getting longer and longer behind us. It was funny though, we ran into some Yoopers, as they recognized the Miners shirt Susan was wearing. Oh yeah, we also started playing the last hole before the group ahead of us was done (whoops!). We hit up the arcade for a little video game action, as well as a workout. They had this jump-roping game I tried really hard to win the jack-pot, but couldn’t manage to keep up with the machine. We managed to feed some fish that day, but it was pretty dark and you couldn’t seem them very well. There was a ton of bluegill in the area, too bad there was no fishing from the dock, we could have had fish for dinner…

Later that night I had yet another surprise for Susan. By chance I had found out Dave Matthews Band was coming to Michigan in August (to the DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston). Being sneaky I had picked up a couple of tickets and a shirt for Susan. I gave her the shirt that said, “Dave Matthews Band 2007 Spring Tour” on it. She looked at it and had the exact reaction I was hoping for… why the heck did he give me this shirt… we didn’t go to the concert. I then pulled out the tickets and told her, “maybe you’d want to wear it to the concert?” She seemed pretty happy about that! Before tearing down camp I had one more surprise in store for Susan… a canoe trip! I asked the person at the desk where we could rent a canoe for a short trip. He gave me a couple brochure’s and we were off. The river we found wasn’t too far away and the guy we rented from was really nice. And no… we didn’t even tip over, thought it was close. During the process of getting the canoe in the water, we found out the particular canoe we had chose was quite tippy, and we almost ended up in the drink! The guy said the river was pretty lame but I beg to differ as there was lots of foliage down in the river and it was quite the challenge to get through some of it All and all it was a pretty excellent anniversary, Susan’s planning the next one, though I set the bar pretty high ;). We did manage to get a couple shirts as a souvenir and had a fairly uneventful trip on the way home.